Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World

Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World provides a critical analysis of the central role of fossil capitalism in causing climate change and argues that only alternatives based upon democratic eco-socialism can prevent the deepening of the climate crisis.

Employing three core concepts within historical materialism – capitalist accumulation, imperialism and hegemony – it locates the existential threat of our changing climate in the drive for increasing profit and growth, the domination of advanced capitalist states that strip resources and exploit cheap labour, and the consent to the capitalist way of life in the global North. With attention to the ways in which, powered by fossil fuels, capital has subjected the world to its predatory logic, this book charts this history and surveys the damage from the Industrial Revolution to today’s deep civilizational crisis, arguing that the market-based and purely technological solutions of ‘climate capitalism’ are too little, too late.

A call for a multifaceted and multi-scalar shift away from capitalist accumulation, imperialism and class hegemony and instead towards democratic eco-socialism, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political and social theory, the environment and sustainability.

William K. Carroll is Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research explores relationships between corporate power, fossil capitalism and the climate crisis, the political economy and ecology of corporate capitalism, social movements and social change, and critical social theory and method. He has also co-directed ‘Mapping the power of the carbon-extractive corporate resource sector’, a partnership of several universities and civil-society organizations which has examined corporate power and resistance within the global political economy with a focus on fossil capital based in western Canada. He is the author of Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice (2016) and The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century (2010) and the co-author of Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works (2018). He is also the editor of The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci (2024) and Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (2021) and the co-editor of A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony (2016).